


Tipping Point

by CooperCooperGo



Series: After New York [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bad Advice, Canon Divergence - Post-Avengers (2012), Dubious Friendship, Loki (Marvel) Does What He Wants, M/M, Missing Scene, Psychic Bond, Supervillain Coulson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:33:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25812118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CooperCooperGo/pseuds/CooperCooperGo
Summary: Phil is aware that Loki is helplessly attracted to the potential for chaos. Like the promise of nectar to a hummingbird, it calls to him, reels him in along the thin connection of the thing forged between them that day on the helicarrier, when they’d temporarily murdered each other…On the rooftop of an abandoned warehouse in the ruins of Manhattan, Phil Coulson makes a choice.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Phil Coulson, Phil Coulson & Loki
Series: After New York [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1869133
Comments: 17
Kudos: 53





	Tipping Point

**Author's Note:**

> This scene takes place between chapters 15 and 16 of _[After New York, Darkness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14304231/)_ from Phil's point of view. If you haven’t read that yet this will likely not make much sense :)

**_Tipping Point_ ** _. Noun. /ˈtɪp.ɪŋ ˌpɔɪnt/ The point at which a threshold is reached and the system, no longer balanced, requires only the slightest movement to rapidly change its state._

*

Phil Coulson sits on the roof of a furniture warehouse in Brooklyn with Clint Barton—lately Ronin, and before that Hawkeye—sprawled unconscious beside him, and the carnage that he’d wrecked on what was left of Axel’s gang around him, daubing at the blood on his knuckles with the remains of a silk pocket square. They hadn’t put up as much of a fight as he’d wanted them to after Clint went down. He wishes there had been a few more of them.

He takes a deep breath. A familiar shivery awareness raises the fine hair at the back of his neck.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Loki asks, coalescing into existence beside him. Phil turns his head, takes in a familiar glimpse of long lean legs clad in black leather, the gold and emerald of the demigod’s long coat. He turns back to his first aid. Wishes he could wash his hands.

“You let your mask slip,” Loki says, delighted. 

Phil is aware that Loki is helplessly attracted to the potential for chaos. Like the promise of nectar to a hummingbird, it calls to him, reels him in along the thin connection of the thing forged between them that day on the helicarrier, when they’d temporarily murdered each other.

“There’s a reason I have a mask,” Phil says.

“Oh yes, I’m well aware.”

He’s not actually sure that Loki is ever really there. He knows something passed between them in the interval between the spear bisecting his heart and when he’d blasted a hole through Loki’s chest with the Destroyer Armour Prototype Gun. Some link forged in an instant, a gossamer cable, winding taunt across time and space.

It reminds him of the story of Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, who, defeated in battle by the warrior Achilles, breathed out her last breath just as he lifted her helm, beheld the fading light in her eyes, and fell hopelessly, desperately, in love. And how Achilles suffered ever afterward because of it, this connection, driven deep into his heart, the flailing broken end of a golden bond that no longer had an anchor at one end.

What passed between he and Loki the day he died was definitely not love. But it was something. Something enduring. 

Sometimes he wonders what the other Phil Coulson talks about with the other Loki, the one back in Asgard in a golden cage. If that is actually where he is. He gets flashes sometimes, glimpses into other places, other times; snatches of conversations, the whole overlain with the piercing infinite blue of the tesseract.

“This is your choice?” Loki sniffs. He prods at Clint’s leg with the toe of his boot. The surge of possessive rage that seizes Phil surprises him. He fights down the urge to get up and break him in half. Doesn’t let the emotion show on his face.

“He is common,” Loki says.

“He was your choice as well.” Another point of connection. Although, honestly, Phil’s not at all sure that he actually has a choice when it comes to Clint Barton. He dislikes this, it feels like a trap.

“A tool,” Loki says, “nothing more.”

He’s lying. Phil isn’t sure Loki is actually capable of speaking the truth out loud. But he’s learned how to talk to him in the years since the Battle of New York, and he knows where to find it; concealed under layers of obfuscation, buried in illusion. Loki hoards his truths like buried treasure and takes a perverse satisfaction in tempting Phil to dig for them. Phil’s not sure what it says about him that he’s learned to enjoy the process as well.

“He was more to you than that,” Phil says. “He was your anchor, your tether. You needed a connection to this place that you couldn’t forge yourself and so you stole one. Gods don't belong here. Yet you—and all of them—long for it. Like Achilles, you crave what you can never have.”

He can almost feel Loki’s sneer. “Poetry doesn’t suit you, Agent.”

No, Phil thinks, he’s not a poet. But he has always been drawn to truth, compelled to seek the hidden heart of things. Poetry is not so different.

“You needed him,” he goes on, “a child of the realm. An anchor to a place that you desire but cannot possibly ever comprehend.”

“Ridiculous. Midgard is but one of many realms, one that—”

“The realms orbit Midgard. It is the origin. You orbit it as well, you and all the rest of them; both drawn and repulsed by it, caught in its attraction.”

“You’ve been reading my books again, haven’t you?” Loki bends down and whispers in his ear, “ _Naughty_.”

Phil gets glimpses of long passages of some alien history, some lore, that manifests itself as bursts of insight, usually at the border between wakefulness and sleep. He looks forward to them. They’re very interesting. Bullets for his gun.

Phil reaches out a hand, brushes hair back from Clint’s forehead, fingers lingering.

“And because you do not understand this desire,” he says, “you are driven to control the object of it. To rule it. Although that part of it is something entirely specific to you, I think.”

Loki begins to pace. “Believe what you wish. It is of no concern to me.”

“Your brother, by way of contrast, is merely addicted to it.”

“Even your limited comprehension should inform you that I am nothing like my brother.”

“No,” Phil says. “It’s almost as if you’re from somewhere else entirely.”

Loki stops. Draws in a sharp breath.

Phil smiles.

“But,” he says, “you’ll never have it. If you were capable of understanding this you’d have ceased to try long ago.”

“Look around you at the ruins of your city, mortal. I do have it.”

“Temporarily. I’m not finished yet.”

Loki barks out a surprised laugh. “Would it be wrong of me to admit that I’m looking forward to watching your attempt?”

Of course, Phil thinks. The chaos, the destruction, will be glorious. Loki won’t be able to look away.

“I’ll try to make it good for you,” Phil says.

Loki laughs again. “Of that, I have no doubt.”

Phil trails his fingers across the hollow under Clint’s cheek. The fine muscles of his jaw and neck twitch and relax minutely, as if seeking further contact. Even unconscious his flesh is responsive to Phil’s touch, as if longing to close some connection between them. Phil feels the same yearning tugging at him, as if the very molecules of his skin were attuned to him, the fragile sprouted seedling of a desire he thought had been burned out of him turning its face toward the sun.

He can’t say that he remembers exactly who he was before he died. The past is some vague country, details blurred, obscured by fog. He thinks the day to day of his current life is not so much different than it was then, though. The mission. The work. He had liked the clarity of this second life, unencumbered by the overlay of color that had vanished when he’d died. The crimsons and golds of anger, of passion. The cool faded blues of longing, of melancholy. The deep tawny yellows of power, inspiration, and purpose. The pale leaf-green of hope. All the colours of the rainbow laid atop his days, soaking like spilled paint into the fabric of his life before Loki’s spear ended it.

When he’d woken up after that they were gone.

He hadn’t missed them. They had been replaced with a sort of dull silver-grey, a barely there tint of resolve and will power and drive. Strength of purpose. Focus.

He’d liked that. Preferred it.

But when he’d finally given in to what they wanted—Sitwell, Romanov, the rest of them, his…friends—and brought Clint here he’d found, alone in his chambers, very late at night, or in quiet moments with nothing that needed doing, that the colours had begun to come creeping back. Rising up from the fingerprints where Clint had touched him. Like bruises. Broken capillaries leaking anger and longing and hope into the skin of his lips, that singular handprint over his mended heart.

The pins and needles of the colour seeping back into his life had felt like blood rushing into a limb that had fallen asleep. He had resented it. It was painful.

Phil strokes his thumb across Clint’s lips. His skin is pale in the moonlight, lashes a dark line against his cheek. Phil watches the shadows play across his face, clouds scudding in to hide and reveal the moon, the first hint of a midnight rain in the air.

Loki had seen Clint as a tool. Perhaps…that is part of what he is to Phil as well. A bridge. A path. A candle in the darkness.

Something like that…

The pale green of the newly sprouted feeling—Phil can’t bring himself to name it yet—glows with a vibrancy that colours everything, scalding in its intensity. It tears at him, as agonising as a gunshot wound. He can feel it changing him, forging him into something else. 

Clint had been right. The old Phil Coulson would not have come to the warehouse tonight. Something has changed. He’s not sure what exactly, or how much.

He’s aware of another colour creeping in; black and bitter and cold. Fear.

“Your obsession with the archer makes you foolish,” Loki says.

“You’re right.”

“It is weakness,” Loki whispers.

“Yes,” Phil says. “It is.”

“You could easily regain the peace you once had,” Loki says conversationally, “the clarity. The glorious purpose.” The heavy leather of his coat brushes Phil’s knee as Loki comes to stand next to him. “Don’t tell me that you are not tempted.”

He _is_ tempted. Phil moves his hand to Clint’s neck, fingers under his jaw. He tightens his grip, feeling the deep slow strokes of Clint’s heartbeat pushing blood through the carotid artery in his neck. Warm. Fragile.

Loki crouches down next to him, drawn to a tipping point like an insect to a flame. “How easy it would be to end your torment. Yet you hesitate. I could do if for you, if you wish.”

He could let him. Isn’t that what Phil had been hoping for when he came here tonight? To find Clint’s corpse? To wreck vengeance on his killers while secretly thanking them, free of entanglement once more? 

“His death would pain you, I see that. What, then, of a resolution that would leave you free of the burden of guilt? I would gift you this boon. For the sake of my love for you.”

“No,” Phil says. “I don’t want that.”

“You are a poor liar,” Loki says.

“I’m actually a very good liar,” Phil says. “I’m only a poor liar compared to the Prince of Lies.”

Loki inclines his head, accepting the compliment.

“Give him to me,” he says, so, so casually. “I will treat him well, you have my promise. It pains me to see you suffer, though I hardly know why.”

Phil knows why.

He had glimpsed something of the complex matrix of debt and obligation, the attraction and repulsion of electrons in their orbits, the bonds that reach across space and time between himself and this particular god, forged that day on the helicarrier. He doesn’t understand the mechanism but he’d witnessed the pathways, briefly—the web of light that connects the everything of himself with the everything of everyone else—of every _thing_ else. A gleaming matrix making up one great, cosmic entity— _life_ —and the small part that was him that had flickered and changed when he died.

When he stopped being biology and became, instead, physics. Just for a moment.

The connection between himself and Loki—the connection between the bits of him and the bits of the god of mischief that are all just tiny parts of that one vast being of light—is all quite mysterious. He’s content for it to remain that way. He has a job to do. And he suddenly realizes that it is both the same job and different from the one he’d planned to put into motion after tonight. After he’d buried Clint’s body in the ruins of New York.

“No deal,” he says.

Loki rises, the movement jerky, irritated. “It is of no consequence,” he says, pantomiming disinterest. “Merely a whim of mine. I see you are determined to become uninteresting; pray, don’t let me keep you from it. Perhaps you will now retire and take up gardening, or some other equally quotidian pursuit, spending the poor currency of your limited days rutting in obscurity with this broken creature. You disappoint me, Philip.”

There’s a soft pop of imploded air, and Loki is gone.

Phil’s job, his mission…

Only now does he fully understand. The destruction of the Chitauri, the purge, is only the beginning. Phil knows he has it in him to be an excellent agent for vengeance. For revenge. The murder and mayhem he will rain down upon the invaders will be efficient and thorough and utterly merciless.

But he hadn’t really thought of what comes after. Some vague idea of using their captured technology to take his conquest off world. To follow the aliens back to their home planet and do to them what they had done to earth. Destroy their cities. Murder their children. Make them pay.

That was all he had been capable of envisioning before tonight. Before he’d found Clint alive in the ruins of the warehouse. Now he sees further, the future stretching out along a different path before him, infused with the pale green light of hope.

The scourge of the Chitauri is only the first necessary step. What must come after is…rebuilding, he thinks with sudden insight. And you cannot rebuild with vengeance. You cannot rebuild with revenge. You can only build new things with love. That has always ever been the only way.

The world tilts. Phil can almost feel the future changing track. Somewhere in the back of his mind he hears Loki—the god of mischief, the god of chaos, the god of _change_ —laughing.

Clint makes some small movement. Phil removes his hand from his neck, watches the flicker of his eyelids as he struggles up from unconsciousness. Sees his eyes open, sees them focus on him. Watches his face shift, melt into something soft.

Sometimes Phil is horrified at how easy it is to read him. It’s difficult for him to understand how Clint can allow himself to move though the world with his belly exposed, so utterly open, so completely defenceless. It’s why the death’s head tattoo had not surprised him. Clint had always worn his heart on his sleeve.

Still, it’s annoying.

Although he supposes he’s going to have to learn to live with it. Phil has a job to do, and loving this man is now part of it. He’s damn well sure it’s going to get properly done.


End file.
